There is a feeling in heroic poetry, or in a burst of eloquence,
that I sometimes catch in quite different fields. I caught it this
morning, for instance, when I saw the belated trains go by, and
knew how they had been battling with storm, darkness, and distance,
and had triumphed. They were due at my place in the night, but did
not pass till after eight o'clock in the morning. Two trains
coupled together,--the fast mail and the express,--making an
immense line of coaches hauled by two engines. They had come from
the West, and were all covered with snow and ice, like soldiers
with the dust of battle upon them. They had massed their forces,
and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a resolution
that was epic and grand. Talk about the railroad dispelling the
romance from the landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic
element in. The moving train is a proud spectacle, especially on
stormy and tempestuous nights. When I look out and see its light,
steady and unflickering as the planets, and hear the roar of its
advancing tread, or its sound diminishing in the distance, I am
comforted and made stout of heart. O night, where is thy stay! O
space, where is thy victory! Or to see the fast mail pass in the
morning is as good as a page of Homer. It quickens one's pulse for
all day. It is the Ajax of trains. I hear its defiant, warning
whistle, hear it thunder over the bridges, and its sharp, rushing
ring among the rocks, and in the winter mornings see its glancing,
meteoric lights, or in summer its white form bursting through the
silence and the shadows, its plume of smoke lying flat upon its
roofs and stretching far behind,--a sight better than a battle. It
is something of the same feeling one has in witnessing any wild,
free careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or in beholding
the charge of an army; or in listening to an eloquent man, or to a
hundred instruments of music in full blast,--it is triumph,